REVIEWS

Snuff theatre. At Belvoir Street Theatre (Downstairs) on Thursday night Mother and Child, a one-act play, opened. Theatre writer John Pierce reports that Vanessa Downing and Tamblyn Lord were joined on stage by a scene-stealing cockroach that ambled on and off the intimate Downstairs space towards the feet of the audience, then changed its mind and wandered back on stage. Downing was warmly applauded for an unscripted stamp that ended the interloper's stage career. Pierce suggests: "Maybe the cockroach wandered into the Downstairs space after it became tired of Waiting for Godot upstairs." Aargh!

Column 8, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 February 2003

You've heard about subtext, the stuff characters think and feel but don't say out loud. The actors, director and audience share the puzzle interpreting Jon Fosse's brief and shadowy drama: everything's in the subtext. A mother (Vanessa Downing) and her adult son (Tamblyn Lord) meet after a lengthy separation: she twitters on about this and that, he replies in monosyllables. Yet there's something half-discernible, something very unpleasant, moving beneath the surface. You glimpse the fin of the shark and imagine the teeth.

Fosse writes the way Steve Riech composes: cool, minimal and with repetitive phrases that, when added together, pack a surprisingly weighty emotional punch. The play hints - even that overstates Fosse's stealth - at incest, abandonment and self destruction. Downing, Lord and director Joseph Uchitel could dive deeper: I think there's an even more tense and creepy production to be had.

May-Brit Akerholt translates from Fosse's Norwegian. The crooked angles of designer Karla Urizar's barely-there set suggest an out-of-kilter world; the shadows of Stephen Hawker's lighting are haunting shadows of a half-lived childhood.

Colin Rose, The Sun Herald, 23 February 2003

A Longing Never Fulfilled

Like strangers on a first date, mother and son stalk each other. She is effusive, but gauche; he is taciturn.

It is the first time the son has visited his mother's home, having been raised mostly by his grandparents.

The air is pregnant with expectation as their story unfolds through sparse and stilted conversation.

There is an emptiness, a longing that is never fulfilled.

The actors work well in the confines pf the space and of Jon Fosse's laconic writing.

John Pierce, The Catholic Weekly, 2 March 2003

In a room in Oslo, with a chair, a window and barely a right angle in sight (design Karla Urizar), boy (Tamblyn Lord) arrives to meet up with his mother (Vanessa Downing).
He stands at the door, motionless, undemonstrative and curt. As she says several times: "You're not exactly talkative."

She is his physical polar opposite, shifting around the space with a well-practised charm.
She prattles, mostly at the start about the house and her high-powered public service job and the country and what she thinks of other women.
Underneath the coy social seduction, she is almost proud of her misogyny, despite her claims to support feminism.

The Norwegian poet and dramatist Jon Fosse has written a marvellous exercise in understatement, a poetic and skilful drama of subtexts and gaps.

There is much surface material - about the boy's study, his sexuality or lack thereof, her career, her thoughts on gender, her ambitions and the absent father's new life. Most important is her abandonment of him (her career, you understand) after birth, to live with her Christian fundamentalist mother, and then with his dad.

There are fascinating tensions between these two, ranging from a faintly uncomfortable remembrance of his youthful desire to sleep on her breasts, the possibility of him being an unwanted pregnancy, to her fervent desire for him to stay and share a bottle of wine.
They're two people related to each other who have nothing in common - certainly nothing (in this theatrical world) as prosaic as love. They are strangers joined by an accident of birth decades ago, with her floundering in the tribulations of memory, and him wondering whether it would have been better not to be born.

May-Brit Akerholt's translation from Norwegian works subtly with the rhythms and vocabulary of Australian English inside a very spare and poetic structure. Both actors relish the words they speak - Lord is excellent with his silences punctuated with simple refusal and occasional anger. Downing is superb as the coquettish, faintly desperate mother, seeking affirmation of her vanity from her disinterested offspring.

Joseph Uchitel directs simply, keeping a tight control on the spatial relations (at the end of this 50-minute visit, mum and spawn are in almost mirror positions from the start) and an even tighter grasp on the subtlety.

It's an enticing and beautifully acted drama of the spaces between polite conversation, a fascinating exercise in text and subtext.

Towards the end, it's revealed that the mother's favourite story is Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Such is Fosse's honed economy that in one such detail an entire character can, by reference to an older, more complicated and nuanced play, be further revealed. Devastation is in the details, spoken and/or unspoken.

Stephen Dunne, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 March 2003

Mother and Child is the first production in Australia of the work of one of Norway's leading writers, Jon Fosse. It is a strong piece ­ an encounter between a mother and the now adult son she abandoned as an infant. It is given a taut production by Joseph Uchitel for the East Coast Theatre Company, with two fine actors, Vanessa Downing and Tamblyn Lord, in vivid translation by May-Brit Akerholt. We need more of the non-English repertoire in this country. It plays at Belvoir Downstairs until March 16.

John McCallum, The Australian, 7 March 7 2003